Word: allen
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Shuberts brought Allen to Broadway in The Passing Show of 1922. From then until 1928, Fred was never out of a Broadway show. But for all those years, convinced that the little juggler from Boston would never last in the big time, he never even unpacked his trunk. In 1928, feeling more secure, he married Portland, a chorine in George White's Scandals. In the next three years he had his biggest Broadway hits, The Little Show and Three's a Crowd. But in 1932, he found himself without a booking. Why not fool around with that...
...Flat Voice!" Before he even got on the air, the couple of months became seven. When he did, it was by a flounder. An unwary adman, carrying an Allen audition record to the president of a corn products company, took the costly economy of going by Manhattan subway. On the way. the portable record-player got banged up. All the sponsor could hear was Allen's rasp. "Get me that man with the flat voice!" he ordered...
...next three years Allen had three shows. It was in 1935, with Town Hall Tonight, that Fred really got on the radio beam. Not long after, he latched on to the biggest stunt of his career: his feud with Jack Benny. One night he assured a guest on his program, a twelve-year-old violinist, that he played the Flight of the Bumble Bee better than Benny played it after 40 years of practicing. Showman Benny knew a cue when he heard one. For ten years radio's biggest running gag has been kept alive without a single backstage...
...year later, now healthy but a mild hypochondriac, he came back to the air, began his present half-hour show. Its main attractions: a ten-minute sketch involving a guest star and a short stroll down the most famed of all airlanes: Allen's Alley...
...Alley is a fairly serious attempt to take four large U.S. social groups, personify them-and play them for laughs. In other hands this idea has produced, at best, good caricatures. Allen has built it into at least two larger-than-life characters and a wealth of thoughtful jests. Each Sunday (8:30 p.m., E.S.T., NBC), as he wanders through the Alley, Allen visits...